In a few years these people will be old enough to work in an office (not saying they will, it's just a possibility), and set me tell you, I think they're not going to *want* to touch Windows, MacOS, or KDE/Gnome with a fire poker -- it's too messy. They won't want to work on their computer, they'll want to work on their *tasks*.
Given the target audience for OLPC, I predict that long before these kids make it into the workforce, Sugar will be available for Ubuntu, either as an app to run on top of a windowing environment or as a standalone interface.
In fact, there will probably be a fork of Edubuntu with a name like Subuntu, Sedubuntu, or OXubuntu, unless the devs figure out how to fit it all on the same CD anyway. In that case, different users logging into the same machine can have different default sessions. Those who feel confined by Sugar, who make the effort to learn the desktop paradigm, can use GNOME, KDE, etc.
Now Tivo comes along and takes your software and with a legal trick circumvents your license, making sure nobody is actually able to obtain Tivo's modifications to your software.
Every bit of Tivo's source code is available, and anyone who wants to use it can use the software. You are completely free to use that software on any hardware that will run it. They've built hardware with PROM bootstrap that refuses to execute a kernel that isn't signed by a Tivo key. There are very good reasons why a company might want to do that. First of all is to be able to void any warranty they provide for the hardware, and support services for users, should an unofficial kernel be used.
I'd like to see the Tivo guys put a sticker somewhere inside the unit that says 'warranty void if removed', and under that sticker have a one-way switching mechanism that a user could engage to accept the responsibility for running unauthorized kernels, which would disengage that feature of the 'BIOS'. The absence of such an opt-out mechanism is probably a deal-breaker for many potential buyers.
So use Myth TV instead. You can even contribute some of Tivo's modifications to the project if you like.
so youd rather sit and watch it permutate for hundreds or thousands (or more) hours depending on the algorithm?
Actually, I'd rather that the professor tell his brother the federal agent that he can get the school's computer lab machines to work in parallel, trying to brute-force the encryption, and that given the complexity of the problem, he'll have it cracked anywhere between 0 and x hours. Then the FBI agent brother could go do something else and get a call on his cell phone from the geek brother that they cracked it.
Generally, all it takes to be a celebrity is to look and/or sound good. I cringe when I hear some blow-dried buffoon talk about the latest news from NASA and describe a spacewalk occurring 'in the absence of gravity' or some similar stupidity.
Even TV programs that try to get good technical advisers, like NUMB3RS, frequently get basic science and technology wrong. I don't know anyone who can crack a disk encryption scheme in a few seconds anytime they want.
Either the Nazis will come out of a time warp in the 1960s
No need for that. These will be neonazis. Think "Indiana Jones and the Boys from Brazil", or maybe Indy could team up with young Jake and Elwood Blues: "I hate Illinois Nazis! And snakes. I really hate Illinois Nazi Snakes!"
If we could get an open standard for firmware downloads, that is not only OS-neutral, but could actually be managed by the computer's BIOS or equivalent, we'd have an acceptable situation. Imagine a boot loader like GRUB being able to throw a firmware blob off a small drive (memory card, USB keychain) into a wireless chipset, then use that interface to load an entire OS off a network server.
There are sound economic reasons to use firmware that must be loaded at boot time rather than the slightly more expensive EEPROM, and a good technical reason as well. Ever since Intel's embarrassment over the Pentium's infamous bug, microprocessors have included the ability to load microcode patches at boot. Engineers learned from that experience that there must be a way to fix HW problems with firmware patches. If you have ever upgraded the firmware on a device only to have a power failure at the critical time that the EEPROM was being reflashed, you know what the technical advantage is.
Since the device itself may have information about its internal state that isn't disclosed to the CPU, there should be a mechanism for it to signal the host that it needs a fresh copy of its firmware overlay. I'm sure that systems programmers can think of a few other items to go on the list. Now all we need is a working group of the major players to come up with a standard. Maybe it could be done as an extension of Open Firmware.
They didn't get too far from the coast, or they might have realized the error.
You know the first rule of Medieval Warm Period Club? Don't talk about the Medievel Warm Period. The Global Warming people don't have an explanation for it (reverses the direction of the Hockey Stick), nor the fact that Mars has been warming up, so they want us to just... LOOK! Britney Spears' coochie!
Before I go and get all excited, I'm going to have to see something more than a cheesy GIF
Dude! I've seen full-length movies where people can go faster than light. They use this thing called warp drive powered by antimatter and Scotch whiskey.
Since they got 2GB of RAM, a built in camera, AMD dual core 64 bit processor,
...they might have the resources to get tolerable performance out of Vista. That's the biggest reason MS did this. It takes a 'top of the line' machine to get performance like I get out of my Celeron laptop with a half gig of RAM running a less-demanding OS.
You have a little chat with the guys in the department. You tell them that lawyers keep track of how much time they spend working on each client's cases. It's called 'billable hours'. An associate who doesn't produce them in sufficient quantity gets fired. It's just the way it is.
Blame it on the beancounters. "I need these stats to be able to justify our jobs. If I can't show the Guys in the Ties that I need both of you, they'll make me get rid of one. If it comes to that, we'll lose the one who logs the least hours working trouble tickets. It probably won't even be up to me at that point."
Every phone call or trip to an employee's cubicle is an 'event' or 'activity' that needs to be documented, even if just with a sentence fragment (Asked Jane to reboot her workstation and call back if further errors.). Make sure your system accounts for who you're supporting. When budget time comes, you might be able to show that the lusers in one department generate a disproportionate number of support calls, because they insist on being local admins with the power to install extra crap you haven't tested. Your fourth person's salary might come out of that department's budget.
But the big win will come when you can data-mine your system and find patterns. "That GPF is only showing up on workstations with Foo version 3.6 build 2405 using the Barf-o-matic 2010 video card with the xZyzzy chipset."
That was rather my point. Steffler is a doctor who reads medical images, which may or may not make him a 'medical imaging specialist', who wrote to the Inquirer about Gutmann's comments. That doesn't somehow confer any medical imaging skills upon Gutmann, who I'm sure would certainly be happy to add this to his CV at his earliest convenience.
I just wish someone could teach reading comprehension skills to rar42, Rytr23, ScuttleMonkey, or you.
Umm, excuse me for being a buttinsky.. but I beleive second quote is in fact FROM INQ reader BRAD STEFFLER MD!!! Who may, in fact start off a quote with "As a physician who uses PCs for image review before I perform surgery.."
Indeed he may. Where the submitter and the 'editor' seem to have wandered off into LaLa Land is in transferring this property of Steffler to Gutmann.
I thought that people could follow the rest of it from the highlighting I'd done, but I guess there are a couple of you who need me to connect the dots for you.
It seems some Slashdot "readers" also have the wrong title..
"Peter Gutmann's report describes the pernicious DRM built into Vista and required by MS for approval of hardware and drivers," said INQ reader Brad Steffler, MD, who brought the report to our attention. "As a physician who uses PCs for image review before I perform surgery, this situation is intolerable. It is also intolerable for me as a medical school professor as I will have to switch to a MAC or a Linux PC. These draconian dicta just might kill the PC as we know it."
Gutmann is a CompSci guy who has been a biggie in the crypto community since about forever. You'd think an 'editor' would know that. Alas, Slashdot has people with the title, who don't do a job that deserves it.
The next step is to take the lesser programs that get shoveled onto install disks under the alleged name "diversity", and simply not ship them.
That is precisely what Ubuntu does, so as to be able to use a single CD both to boot into a 'live' environment, and to install to HD.
Many of the other programs are still available via the package manager over the internet or off a repository CD/DVD for those people who want them, but most users who don't know that those programs exist (and are happy with what the Ubunto people have chosen as best of breed) won't ever install them.
We are pretty much at the point where Aunt Tillie could use an Ubuntu machine that was either preinstalled by Wal-Mart or post-installed by her geek niece or nephew. She can read her gmails, look at the pictures of the grandkids on Picasa, and in general do the things that the average netizen does. ESR points out that if those pictures or movies are in patent-encumbered formats that distros refuse to package, AT will be a Digital Ghetto resident, motivated to move up to a Real Operating System.
I'm not as sure as he is that all distros have the same aversion to the legal threats. Unfortunately, those that are by geography protected from some of the more insane legal problems (Ubuntu in South Africa) have their own philosophical reasons to avoid nonfree software.
But I do agree with his decision to work with the Linspire people to make the Codex a reality. If it can be done in a distro-neutral, userspace manner as he's suggested, it takes away a major impediment to getting that machine on the shelf at Wal-Mart where Aunt Tillie doesn't need a geek in the family.
having been on the payroll at the time of the contract signing with MS....does this mean he's got any sort of restrictions now dangling on his neck, at least from the point of view of microsoft?
#include <ianal.h>
A contract to which Novell and Microsoft are parties cannot bind him personally. It can obviously affect him in his capacity as a Novell employee. I suspect that he has not committed any changes to the Samba tree since the agreement was enacted, nor will he until next month, just to be sure that he isn't opening that particular door. He probably is familiar with how Gerald Combs had to change the name of Ethereal to Wireshark because his former employer had legal claims over the prior name. This one isn't a trademark issue, of course, but the same principle applies.
Centripetal force is the force that you apply to something in order to make it travel in a circle.
Yep. It is the inward, centripetal force applied by the structure of the rotating space station that substitutes for the upward force through a floor or the ground on your feet that causes weight.
People get confused and say things like 'no gravity' in orbit; what they mean is 'no weight'. There's nearly as much gravity in orbit as there is on the surface of the Earth; there's also nothing pushing you up to give you weight. That's why astronaut training can be done without leaving the atmosphere in the 'vomit comet'; the pilot takes the plane very high, then puts it into a dive where the engines are producing exactly enough power to overcome atmospheric drag.
Centrifugal force is the opposite force that appears because of Newton's third law.
Centrifugal 'force' isn't. It's an apparent force only in a rotating frame of reference, to explain the net zero force on the rotating things that clearly are subject to centripetal forces. It's also known as 'inertia'.
Differential pricing eh? $40 for me, $1 for someone else so you can get an extra $1? Just doesn't sit right with me.
Was the software worth what you paid for it? If so, you made a good decision. What someone else paid is Ear Elephant. Most products are sold at different prices at different times (ever hear of a SALE?), for volume discounts, or even humanitarian reasons (drug companies routinely charge much more for their products in the US than they do in Africa, where the patients can't afford to pay as much.
Aren't American roads in the large cities laid out in grids anyway?
The older a city is, the less true this is. In a city like Boston, there are neighborhoods with local grids at roughly the same granularity as those in London, and the same tendency of a road passing through an intersection to change names and reset numbering back to 1. Even Manhattan Island, the stereotypical grid of numbered Streets and Avenues, has them laid out according to the general orientation of the island, rather than the points of a compass
By contrast, Washington, DC was carefully planned, with a Cartesian quadrant system of N/S and E/W 'Streets' numbered from the Capitol building, as well as 'Avenues' that run at odd angles to that grid. The Public Land Survey System, which was used for the territories gained/defined after the US became independent of Britain, imposes a compass grid that largely governs newer areas, such as Florida and Western states.
It is often said that St. Louis (built long before the survey system) is the westernmost 'eastern' city, and Kansas City the easternmost 'western' city. A comparison of the two shows that the former indeed has virtually no streets that align with the compass, while the latter has most major roads aligned with the survey grids, right down to the streets across the state line not being quite exactly aligned (due to accumulated errors over the distances from the 5th and 6th Principal Meridians, from which the surveys were conducted).
The reason why London cabbies have to learn so many different street names is because there's so damned many of them, and no particular scheme to tie them together.
I've said as much myself. The fact that there is a correlation between looking at certain pictures and performing certain acts was introduced as evidence of the pictures causing the acts. I don't agree with it myself.
(I'm not sure why that report is so popular with the pro-porn crowd. If you think about it - do you really want to claim that it's more likely you would be out there raping women if you didn't have your porn?)
Nice try at the ad hominem there, but no cigar. The idea is that some would-be rapists have their desires satisfied by the porn, and are then able to control themselves better. And there's no more reason to disbelieve that idea than the one the pro-censorship crowd pushes, which is that the porn stimulates the desires further, or lowers inhibitions against progressively more perverse behavior.
I am happy to draw the line at physically touching those who have not (or due to their youth or mental incapacity are unable to have) given consent. That is a nice bright line of distinction that avoids the need to worry about what correlates there may be to the physical act.
Slashdot Mirror
"I edit that I edit".
In fact, there will probably be a fork of Edubuntu with a name like Subuntu, Sedubuntu, or OXubuntu, unless the devs figure out how to fit it all on the same CD anyway. In that case, different users logging into the same machine can have different default sessions. Those who feel confined by Sugar, who make the effort to learn the desktop paradigm, can use GNOME, KDE, etc.
I'd like to see the Tivo guys put a sticker somewhere inside the unit that says 'warranty void if removed', and under that sticker have a one-way switching mechanism that a user could engage to accept the responsibility for running unauthorized kernels, which would disengage that feature of the 'BIOS'. The absence of such an opt-out mechanism is probably a deal-breaker for many potential buyers.
So use Myth TV instead. You can even contribute some of Tivo's modifications to the project if you like.
Actually, I'd rather that the professor tell his brother the federal agent that he can get the school's computer lab machines to work in parallel, trying to brute-force the encryption, and that given the complexity of the problem, he'll have it cracked anywhere between 0 and x hours. Then the FBI agent brother could go do something else and get a call on his cell phone from the geek brother that they cracked it.
Even TV programs that try to get good technical advisers, like NUMB3RS, frequently get basic science and technology wrong. I don't know anyone who can crack a disk encryption scheme in a few seconds anytime they want.
There are sound economic reasons to use firmware that must be loaded at boot time rather than the slightly more expensive EEPROM, and a good technical reason as well. Ever since Intel's embarrassment over the Pentium's infamous bug, microprocessors have included the ability to load microcode patches at boot. Engineers learned from that experience that there must be a way to fix HW problems with firmware patches. If you have ever upgraded the firmware on a device only to have a power failure at the critical time that the EEPROM was being reflashed, you know what the technical advantage is.
Since the device itself may have information about its internal state that isn't disclosed to the CPU, there should be a mechanism for it to signal the host that it needs a fresh copy of its firmware overlay. I'm sure that systems programmers can think of a few other items to go on the list. Now all we need is a working group of the major players to come up with a standard. Maybe it could be done as an extension of Open Firmware.
They didn't get too far from the coast, or they might have realized the error. You know the first rule of Medieval Warm Period Club? Don't talk about the Medievel Warm Period. The Global Warming people don't have an explanation for it (reverses the direction of the Hockey Stick), nor the fact that Mars has been warming up, so they want us to just... LOOK! Britney Spears' coochie!
Blame it on the beancounters. "I need these stats to be able to justify our jobs. If I can't show the Guys in the Ties that I need both of you, they'll make me get rid of one. If it comes to that, we'll lose the one who logs the least hours working trouble tickets. It probably won't even be up to me at that point."
Every phone call or trip to an employee's cubicle is an 'event' or 'activity' that needs to be documented, even if just with a sentence fragment (Asked Jane to reboot her workstation and call back if further errors.). Make sure your system accounts for who you're supporting. When budget time comes, you might be able to show that the lusers in one department generate a disproportionate number of support calls, because they insist on being local admins with the power to install extra crap you haven't tested. Your fourth person's salary might come out of that department's budget.
But the big win will come when you can data-mine your system and find patterns. "That GPF is only showing up on workstations with Foo version 3.6 build 2405 using the Barf-o-matic 2010 video card with the xZyzzy chipset."
I thought that people could follow the rest of it from the highlighting I'd done, but I guess there are a couple of you who need me to connect the dots for you.
Thanks for showing how it's done.Many of the other programs are still available via the package manager over the internet or off a repository CD/DVD for those people who want them, but most users who don't know that those programs exist (and are happy with what the Ubunto people have chosen as best of breed) won't ever install them.
We are pretty much at the point where Aunt Tillie could use an Ubuntu machine that was either preinstalled by Wal-Mart or post-installed by her geek niece or nephew. She can read her gmails, look at the pictures of the grandkids on Picasa, and in general do the things that the average netizen does. ESR points out that if those pictures or movies are in patent-encumbered formats that distros refuse to package, AT will be a Digital Ghetto resident, motivated to move up to a Real Operating System.
I'm not as sure as he is that all distros have the same aversion to the legal threats. Unfortunately, those that are by geography protected from some of the more insane legal problems (Ubuntu in South Africa) have their own philosophical reasons to avoid nonfree software.
But I do agree with his decision to work with the Linspire people to make the Codex a reality. If it can be done in a distro-neutral, userspace manner as he's suggested, it takes away a major impediment to getting that machine on the shelf at Wal-Mart where Aunt Tillie doesn't need a geek in the family.
A contract to which Novell and Microsoft are parties cannot bind him personally. It can obviously affect him in his capacity as a Novell employee. I suspect that he has not committed any changes to the Samba tree since the agreement was enacted, nor will he until next month, just to be sure that he isn't opening that particular door. He probably is familiar with how Gerald Combs had to change the name of Ethereal to Wireshark because his former employer had legal claims over the prior name. This one isn't a trademark issue, of course, but the same principle applies.
People get confused and say things like 'no gravity' in orbit; what they mean is 'no weight'. There's nearly as much gravity in orbit as there is on the surface of the Earth; there's also nothing pushing you up to give you weight. That's why astronaut training can be done without leaving the atmosphere in the 'vomit comet'; the pilot takes the plane very high, then puts it into a dive where the engines are producing exactly enough power to overcome atmospheric drag.
Centrifugal 'force' isn't. It's an apparent force only in a rotating frame of reference, to explain the net zero force on the rotating things that clearly are subject to centripetal forces. It's also known as 'inertia'.Business as usual. get over it.
By contrast, Washington, DC was carefully planned, with a Cartesian quadrant system of N/S and E/W 'Streets' numbered from the Capitol building, as well as 'Avenues' that run at odd angles to that grid. The Public Land Survey System, which was used for the territories gained/defined after the US became independent of Britain, imposes a compass grid that largely governs newer areas, such as Florida and Western states.
It is often said that St. Louis (built long before the survey system) is the westernmost 'eastern' city, and Kansas City the easternmost 'western' city. A comparison of the two shows that the former indeed has virtually no streets that align with the compass, while the latter has most major roads aligned with the survey grids, right down to the streets across the state line not being quite exactly aligned (due to accumulated errors over the distances from the 5th and 6th Principal Meridians, from which the surveys were conducted).The reason why London cabbies have to learn so many different street names is because there's so damned many of them, and no particular scheme to tie them together.
Who is it?
Candygram.
You like we! You really like we!
I am happy to draw the line at physically touching those who have not (or due to their youth or mental incapacity are unable to have) given consent. That is a nice bright line of distinction that avoids the need to worry about what correlates there may be to the physical act.